I think I'm a part of the first generation of journalists to skip print media entirely, and I've learned a lot these last few years at Forbes. My work has appeared on TVOvermind, IGN, and most importantly, a segment on The Colbert Report at one point. Feel free to follow me on Twitter or on Facebook, write me on Facebook or just email at paultassi(at)gmail(dot)com. I'm also almost finished with my sci-fi novel series, The Earthborn Trilogy.

EA Employee Chastises Company Over SimCity in Public Letter

The release of SimCity will likely be studied for years as a case of how not to launch a product, and the story keeps getting stranger and stranger. Six hours ago, an anonymous redditor posting under the name “DisappointedEA” made a thread containing an open letter expressing his disappointment in the company’s handling of SimCity. The twist? He reportedly works there.

The poster, claiming to be an artist at EARS, said the only proof he could provide was the fact that all employees received an email from EA Executive Vice President and Chief Talent Officer, Gabrielle Toledano, today about International Women’s Day, which is in fact true. But he’s now deleted the entire text of the post after it received so much attention, which seems like some form of proof in and of itself. I have contacted him to see if he can privately confirm his position at EA, but am still waiting to hear back.

The letter questions EA’s decision to release SimCity with always on DRM, which has ravaged the launch of the game with paying players not being able to log on, or sometimes waiting hours for the privilege. EA has actually resorted to stripping features out of the game in order to help it run better, which has caused some outlets to drastically lower their official review scores. The current buggy, feature-deleted product is not the same game they played for their review, they say.

The alleged employee goes on to say that EA should actually patch the game to allow offline play. He accuses the company of being anti-consumer, shirking accountability and lacking integrity, all things that go against EA’s official list of company values.

Here’s the full text of the letter in question, since nothing ever actually disappears from the internet once it’s made public:

“To the executives at EA, from one of your employees

I am deeply embarrassed by the troubled launch of Sim City and I hope you are too. When I walk around our campus and look at the kind of talent we’ve collected, the amenities we have access to and the opportunities working at such a big company affords us, I can’t imagine how for release after release, EA continues to make the same embarrassing, anti-consumer mistakes. We should be better than this. You should not be failing us so badly.

Another thing I see when I walk around our campus are massive banners that display what are said to be our company values. They are on posters on every floor, included in company-wide emails and hanging above the cafeteria in bright colors. You even print them on our coffee mugs so we see them every day. But somehow when planning the launch of Sim City, you threw them all out the window.

Most important of the values you are ignoring is Think Consumers First. What part of the Sim City DRM scheme, which has rendered the game unplayable for hundreds of thousands of fans across the globe, demonstrates that you are thinking about consumers before you are thinking about yourselves? Does “first” mean something different in boardrooms than it does to the rest of us? Does the meaning of that word change when you get the word “executive” in front of your title?

You can’t even pretend that you didn’t know consumers would be angry about this. Common sense aside, consumers complained about this during your public betas. In fact, when one of them posted his criticisms on the forums, he was banned! You tried to silence your critics. The same thing is happening now as users write in to demand refunds. What part of this behavior aligns with our company value to Be Accountable?

What you’ve demonstrated with this launch is that our corporate management does not believe in our core values. They are for the unwashed masses, not for the important people who forced this anti-consumer DRM onto the Sim City team. This DRM scheme is not about the consumers or even about piracy. It’s about covering your own asses. It allows you to hand-wave weak sales or bad reviews and blame outside factors like pirates or server failures in the event the game struggles. You are protecting your own jobs at the expense of consumers. I think this violates the Act With Integrity value I’m looking at on my own coffee mug right now.

On behalf of your other employees, I’d like to ask you to fix this. Allow the Sim City team to patch the game to run offline. If Create Quality and Innovation is still a core value that you believe in, then this shouldn’t be a hard decision. Games that gamers can’t play because of server overload or ISP issues are NOT quality. Be Bold by giving the consumers what they want and take accountability for the mistake.

Finally I’d like to ask you to follow the last company value on the list in the future: Learn and Grow. When you made this mistake with Spore, the company and all your employees suffered for it. You didn’t learn from that mistake and you are making it again with Sim City.

So please, learn from this debacle. Don’t do this again. Grow into better leaders and actually apply our company values when you make decisions. Don’t just use them as tools to motivate your staff. With the money, talent and intellectual property available to EA, we should be leading the industry into a golden age of consumer-focused game publishing. Instead we’re the most reviled game publisher in the world. That’s your fault. Things can only change if you actually start following the company values and apply them to every title we launch.

Sincerely,

A Disappointed But Hopeful Artist at EARS”

It’s a bold move for this nameless employee to write something like this, but so bold he might not be nameless for long. The internet loves a good big game hunt, and many are likely hard at work attempting to find out who this person is. The same is probably also true for EA themselves, but their PR nightmare would likely only multiply if they tracked down and fired this person, should he actually work for the company.

And if this is all a big hoax? Overlooking the fact that such a thing would be nearly impossible to prove short of an outright confession, the fact that this letter has gotten so much attention speaks to the true magnitude of this fan uprising. People are always looking for the next reason to pile on EA, but this time, they’ve found one that exposes a real issue in gaming today. People paid for a product they cannot play, due to a measure meant to ward away pirates. In many cases, players also cannot get refunds for their purchase of a non-functional game, which only serves to aggravate the situation further.

As brave as this supposed employee may be, it may come back to bite him, but his Spartacus moment is turning into a rallying cry for the victims of one of the biggest launch disasters in modern gaming history. At this rate, who knows what will happen next?

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Hmm, personally, I think it is irrelevant if the person really works at EA or not. Just the sheer dissapointment and pointing out the anti-consumer behaviours and forcing the new game to be online only is enough for me. If someone can highlight these problems and spread the word in some way, people might take notice, think and do something different the next time they think about purchasing a game.

Games are a business first and entertainment second in many cases for many publishers I’d guess, but if they want to conduct good business with happy customers we could really use less of anti-consumer behaviour like forcing archaic DRM, Always Online affect game acces, gameplay and game design and so on.

By far the most interesting part of this open letter is the point about patching to allow offline use. The very fact it is suggested by an employee indicates that the online component is really not all that significant, unlike what the marketing would lead you to believe.

Cereal? Oh please. EA hates gamers. All it loves is money. And anyone who bought it knowing it was always on DRM has ZERO right to complain. EA doesn’t care. had you boycotted the game they would have sat up and paid attention. Now that they have your sheckels they’re laughing all the way to the bank and calling you fools, because you are fools.

Not worth losing your job by telling it how it is and how your Company fails to satisfy their paying Customers. The Economy is pretty crappy, not smart move at all. At this very moment there’s gamers happy about an Employee for EA telling it how it is, but it’s not those people’s Jobs they may be lost if this man or woman’s identity is tracked down by EA.

Has anyone considered the fact that this always-on DRM is also a violation of your right to privacy? Are you in effect giving away that right when you accept their license terms? Second, now that EA is going to give away a Free Origin game on the 18th, will they include in the license agreement that you give away all rights to redress?

I preordered this game and waited till midnight to play it. After 5 hours of a failed launch waiting for the server to even allow me to download the client I went to sleep, only to wake up and still be unable to play or download the client. After 2 hours on live chat with a tech at origin I finally was able to get my game to download, instal, and even play! BUT after less than an hour of gameplay my game crashed, every single time I played, since then I have only been able to play <5 hours of a new game that I paid $60 for even though I have many other games I have yet beaten and can still play at will. I am unable to get a refund since I preordered from gameStop and they do not provide Digital Game refunds. The PR nightmare that EA has had because of this will by no means crush the company or even slow sales IMO, but hopefully they lean a lesson that they should have learned from other companies that have made these mistakes before.

I would promote this person in a heartbeat. So many people don’t understand that a business degree teaches you nothing about running a business. You either understand the common sense facts the consumers drive your business and you are accountable to them or you don’t. By alienating the consumer in order to deliver the best profit margins to investors you severely damage your long term business prospects. People will avoid your brand and flock to competitors. No expensive piece of paper from any school actually teaches that.

We understand the intent for DRM, sure – you want to protect your investment, you want people to pay for your product! AGREED 100%!

But that is EASY to provide, as MANY, MANY products do, without constant on-line connection required.

THIS product failure is NOT simply tied to DRM. To be blunt this failure is a result of EA Arrogance. There has been too much attempting to associate this failure with DRM failures.

Take a quick gander over to the SimCity site, look at the forums – OLD posts – and as anyone can see the user community begging EA and the SimCity team for months and months to NOT make this an Online game but to make this a stand-alone, to NOT make the cities tiny / incapable but what they ALWAYS were – Large, but to FORCE the user community into “SOMEONE”‘s vision at EA – we were FORCED to be online and FORCED to have tiny cities so we had NO CHOICE by the rely upon others / other cities.

So not ONLY was the infrustructure not ready, but the actual product delivered was sub-par and NOT AT ALL what the community wanted and directly AGAINST what we WERE asking for – and intentionall so.

None should be suprised at this failure, all the result of blatant arrogance.

My only hopes are: EA IMMEDIATELY patches the product and provides the OFFLINE mode we asked for with NO online requirement and provides the product capabilities WE ASKED FOR!

Also, the GAME DEVELOPMENT community realizes – WE (the consumer) HATE the Online requirements for games. If we WANT to go online, fine, make sure that capability exists – but for God’s sake – DONT REQUIRE IT!

Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and call bull on this. I’m sorry! But pirates – particularly the SKIDROW, which are very popular for releasing cracks early – are already estimating that they will have SimCity 5 CRACKED IN LESS THAN A WEEK.

Is “online only” REALLY that effective when it’s useless in LESS THAN A WEEK OF THE RELEASE?

And what if the cracked version is BETTER than the ORIGINAL RELEASE? You control WHAT you do with save files and WHEN you want to play – regardless of your internet status!

EA, you’re making a mountain of a molehill. The vast majority of people actually buying and legit playing your game will always VASTLY OUTNUMBER the pirates. It’s just not worth it, as we can all see.

EA, like many corporate giants, is making a dangerous gamble if it thinks it can continuously undermine consumer trust and confidence in their products. If they truly had knowledge that this game was flawed before it hit the market and they proceeded anyway, they made a big mistake. They got to where they are today by offering quality products and a commitment to satisfying customers. It only take a few flops to ruin a great reputation. Hopefully for EA this incident does not represent a negative trend in poor ethical decision-making. It sounds like EA’s leaders need to get a grip on their corporate culture and remember that ethics is a competitive advantage. Ultimately, customers will flock to the name and brand they trust the most. – Nick Downing, Author of “Taking Command! The Fundamentals of Successful Team Leadership http://www.amazon.com/Command-Fundamentals-Successful-Leadership-ebook/dp/B00AVWW0BO/

I boycotted Warcraft and Diablo for the online requirement after having paid for every copy they made prior. This fiasco with SimCity was the final mistake. I have gone from simply voting with my wallet to actively protesting this problem.

Moreover, if EA is bothering to listen, my 3 sons who are now coming into the age where they want to game online will be prevented from any such activity and will be taught the political reasons for it. It has cost them $240 in my household alone. I doubt that they care or believe me. I will also add that in my profession I have the ability to bring this message to hundreds of young people every year. I bet it comes up!

Diablo3 and Starcraft2 requiring online play was a popular misconception. In fact they both had off line options and only required online access for the achievement counter to work. You did need to register an account name with Blizzard but didn’t have to pay for a monthly subscription to play either of those games. I’m not sure why people had such a difficult time understanding the fundamental differences. If you made this mistake, then you missed out on 2 very good games.

it’s also worth adding, that soon all games will be streamed. The reason is streaming games allows companies to provide better movie quality graphics and by knowing with complete certainty the system’s spec, it can also ensure that there will be no graphic issues.

The other reason games are all moving to this format is because it prevents cheating.

lol…I hope by Warcraft you aren’t talking about World of Warcraft, you know, the game that was planned to be an MMO and people definitely shouldn’t have been surprised when it was online. /facepalm

I didn’t buy Diablo 3 for that reason, and I’m glad I didn’t because it turned out to be a sub-par game anyway.

I also won’t be buying SimCity because of this. When I buy a game, I should own it. Leasing it and being given the “privilege” of playing it for however long they decide to keep the servers up is crap. Pirates will always pirate. Deal with it.

““worth adding, that soon all games will be streamed.” BS. Show me one respectable source that confirms this statement.”

Actually this has been talked about alot from different sources (and no i cant remember them all, although i do recall something about it being mentioned multiple times on G4) and that it would be done in the future. The reason this is not currently the case is because internet service is not yet completely global and they would lose a major group of customers (although it doesnt seem as though EA considered this). Also, connections just arent where they need to be to ensure that all that streaming would work smoothly. Yes steam works great, but consider that they only handle a portion of the gaming community. If every gamer in the world were to just turn to steam right now and only use that for their gaming their servers would probably implode.

I too cancelled my pre-order of Diablo 3 for the online all the time deal. I beta tested Simcity 5, but wasn’t interested in the online all the time deal with that game either. I play single player games. I spend way too much money on PC games as it is, so maybe EA is doing me a favor! I won’t be buying any more games that require internet all the time.

better movie quality, no graphics issues? Seriously? Dude you have no concept of how games work. How in the world is always on and the concept of server host based gaming “better” than one that is local? There is no comparison. Unless you have some super high speed internet connection even a mid level graphics card and CPU will run circles around anything “streamed” of the internet. Even in the EA model the majority of the game files are downloaded to the local machine (eventually), and that is where they sit. EA having your configuration settings for your local computer is no different from any other modern game whether it is completely local or partially web hosted. It doesn’t make it better just because EA says so.

At least someone has integrity at EA. Too bad the company doesn’t have any as a whole. Another case in point for review on how they fail as a whole. Look at the forums for bugs in their other games like the Sims3. It took them over 7 months to fix a bug they introduced in one of their expansions. In that time they released 2 more expansions and 1 or 2 item expansions before the bug was addressed. 7 months for a bug they introduced. As for their excuse that it wasn’t that bad in the beta stages. What did they expect with a closed beta, a time limit of 1 hour of play per city, and limited access to components in game. Most of us who were able to play the closed beta knew this would happen at launch, we expected it. EA can’t play the ignorance card. If the gamers knew, the company certainly knew. http://www.change.org/petitions/create-a-100-offline-single-player-mode-in-simcity-2013-remove-the-origin-requirement-from-it-and-bring-back-popular-features-from-simcity-4 Just as an example of user demanded actions. I hope the news and public will hold EA accountable, if we don’t, we just welcome more issues of this nature.

EA management needs to listen to what this guy says, even if he isn’t an employee, because what he says is true.

I have been trying to install Simshitty for three days now and have played not even a single second. Friends who did play it have nothing to show for it seeing how their savegames got deleted in the crap that EA seems to call their servers.

Hey, Paul, you might wanna see this. On IGN, another Employee for EA was attacking users (myself included) in the comments section for a cheats wiki for Simcity.

He called me a (quote) “fuckin moron,” stated that “complainers” didn’t have an understanding of how servers are run, and, as such, need to “STFU.” He further labeled user complaints as being “radical” and described them as being fueled by an “an angry mob that doesnt lsiten to reason.”

Here’s the EA employee’s account:

http://people.ign.com/hahajason

You can see his job description: “Interactive Design Specialist at EA”

And here’s the link to the wiki article:

http://www.ign.com/wikis/simcity/Cheats_and_Secrets

All you need to do is scroll down to the user comments and read the ones from user “hahaJason.”

If you browse his Disqus account, you’ll see him insulting upset customers in other postings as well.

I wonder how many times you can rape your customers before they say “enough”

What kills me is the game will still sell well because of the casual sims 3 player who forks over $5 a week for a new outfit……you know it was their target all along, this is no city simulator like maxis is known for…..I guess you dont produce a game that goes strong for 4 years with $700 of DLC packs and not see a successful model worth exploiting. They want every single game to be a cash cow like sims 3, it’s EA’s new business model, they have already done it to all their android and Ios offerings. Microtransactions are EA’s new development focus.

Actually, this letter could have been written by any consumer who’s bought anything from EA in the last 20 years. EA is famous for disregarding their customers, ignoring complaints and being just in general arrogant twits about their products. No matter how many times they fail to produce a working product, consumers always forgive them their sins, until the next failure. It’s about time we stopped rewarding failure with our wallets. That’s the only way they’ll learn a little humility: lack of money. On top of that, their shareholders would be well-advised to review their stock.

You haven’t heard back from him because you write for Forbes.com and he knows your opinion on anything video game related is worth about as much as the chili peppered turd I just deposited in my neighbors backyard.

Every single person who bought this game gets exactly what they deserve. I learned my lesson when I inserted Sims 2 for my wife and the error message told me to insert a valid disk not a pirate copy. EA burned me once and only once with their DRM bull. Sure I will did not get to play C&C after that. But lets be real, that game lost it’s integrity the day EA bought out Westwood. DRM does not stop REAL pirates. It only screws over those of us who do not have a hackers knowledge in bypassing it EA’s roadblocks.

I beta tested Sim City and it was absolutely horrible, I wouldn’t take the game for free it isn’t anywhere near as functional or as fun as the first two Sim Cities and quite frankly the whole DRM scam stinks, I bought the latest MSN Flight and had to contend with that mess, and then MSN walked away from the game less than a year later, all of these games should be downloaded, they name a price we pay it, we should be able to possess it like anything else we buy. This is nothing short of digital bait and switch. On Amazon Sim City has a dismal 1-star after 3,000 suckers got hosed buying it and the DRM and inability to access let alone save the game, frequent crashes and miniscule amount of time you fill up the land and can’t build any further leads me to believe this was a crass attempt to monetize pent up demand for what was once a beloved game…

Yeah DRM sucks… I fully can’t stand it… And have been against it for years so far….

HOWEVER..

The pirates are winning – software is costing too much – people are taking advantage of any easy copying in this economy – instead of shelling out the $64.48 after tax for the regular copy of this Sim City 2013. Outrageous!

Especially for a city builder – and with SC2 expansion coming in a few days – you know damn well people would rather grab this then fork over more cash.

Last game I bought was before xmas – so this actually GRABBED me – and you know what? Very beautiful game – it was worth the money – been spending couple hours playing….

So off the topic – they got my money, which is the entire point of building this awesome software… PLUS – they said because of the problems they are providing a free EA game download for the troubles… Free game too??

Pirates can’t crack because they save your games on the SERVER – hence they need to re-write sim city save code to make it cracked – I bet they can eventually do it – not anytime soon…….

Just sharing my 2cents – DRM still blows chunks BUT they are PATCHING / SUPPORTING this product like no other in awhile now.

The fact that the data is saved on the server is not going to prevent pirates from cracking the game. It’s definitely going to slow things down as you’d need to create a virtual server to dump the files to and you’ll need to download EA’s terrain… or create your own terrain generator. This brings me to another thought: no terrain modification? Really? Awful.

Well said by the artist. I hope he receives some kind of “whistleblower” protection for putting EA on the frying pan like this. He was objective with his criticism and makes good points that I see echoed throughout the gaming community. Everywhere I go there is an outcry for the end of the draconian DRM schemes of EA. It’s too bad they own some of the more popular franchises and thus can force those of us who are too weak willed to use their system. How is it that their biggest rival, Steam, can allow offline play for so many of its titles and not be brought crumbling down by these deadly pirates?

I’m 35 and a Account Manager for a large international company…heads, my head, anyone in a 5 mile radius that doesn’t even work for us would be fired if anything this horid happened. EA needs to step up and do “What’s Right”

A well written letter that exemplifies many of our own thoughts exactly. Coming from an EA employee, I think makes this letter that much more meaningful.

I have repeatedly felt bad for the many Developers who have worked very hard and produced many of the good aspects of this game.

This is a moment in time where the Developers should be applauded for their hard work and ingenuity.

I know that many of them were probably eager and excited to receive positive feedback regarding their new creation.

I sympathize with the position their Developers are currently in. They are dedicated to this work, they know what their consumers want, and many times they are forbidden to release a product that will succeed and be well received.

SimCity *could be* great, but it was purposefully degraded for corporate driven, anti-consumer and profit based objectives.

Give it time, someone will crack this game. Adding DRM to a game claiming it will stop pirates is as foolish as waking up in the morning with $10 in your bed from the tooth fairy. Add it or don’t i don’t care either way. There will always be crackers and pirates out there as long as there is digital content to crack, regardless of the countermeasures. Bill Gates said it best, “They’ll get addicted, and then we’ll collect” Maybe if you followed the same train of thought u MIGHT just get the global consumer market back on your side, but until u let go of the silly notion that “DRM thwarts pirates”, and recognize what the consumers, the PAYING customers want, your going to eventually decline in sales and perhaps get ran out of business.